Last week, the Lonelygirl15 videos were indeed exposed as a hoax. The girl depicted was an aspiring actress named Jessica Rose. She subsequently discussed the videos on CNN, The Tonight Show and MTV — not bad exposure for a previous unknown. The creators of the video were revealed to be film professionals who describe their efforts as a “new art form”.
These filmmakers are misguided though — this isn’t art, it’s deception for profit. Misrepresenting commercials as independent user-generated content, actors as members of the public, and fiction as fact is not art, it’s advertising. The Lonelygirl15 videos were created for the explicit purpose of promoting a product, in this case the actress Jessica Rose. —Chris Stevens —Truth or illusion: What’s real on YouTube? (C|Net.uk)
I don’t have much to add, I’m just blogging this because it offers a good overview of the situation.
Update: I guess I do have something to add after all. Hypertext theory describes how literary criticism responds to the democratization of the writing process, whereby the audience and author essentially share the same tools, and the boundaries are blurred. While those theories were developed long before the blogosphere and wikis made any real impact in the democratization of electronic text, they really did a good job predicting the changes on the horizon.
We’re seeing more changes in the world of video, now that we’re seeing professional using their expertise to mimic the gritty realism of amateur productions (think Blair Witch Project).
I have been thinking lately of the importance of the internet-distributed “footage” that is pretty much the MacGuffin in William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition. I taught that book in a literature survey course a few years ago, but very few students could get into it. I wonder if I should try that book again, with upper-level students, now that the online culture of dissecting and analyzing bits of video is part of mainstream culture instead of part of science fiction.
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You can go back even further, to the European adventurers' highly embellished (or completely fabricated) accounts of wonders in the "New World."
"and fiction as fact is not art, it's advertising."
What about the release of War of the Worlds where radio listeners thought Americans were really being attacked? Isn't this producing a similar frenzy and profit margin? Deception for profit is nothing new.
That's very helpful, Eric, especially noting the value of cognition across time. Social networking technology encourages a kind of inter-active, inter-reactive discrete cognition, in that participants try to make connections in single bursts and then watch to see the reaction, and fine-tune their efforts, much like a participant in a face-to-face group brainstorming session. Students who are good oral communicatiors and who carry out social activities via text messaging often nod and sparkle when I put it that way, though of course I have no data to back that up. Thanks for supplying a dose of theory to help me make sense of what I've observed.
Dennis: Your comment here goes to my previous observation where audience and author become part of an intertextual reality (a la Kristeva). Boundaries are blurred and composition enters into post-process mode. Cognition is distributed across time and space as Jill Walker points out in her work on distributed narrative. Right now, I'm working on the literary critical relationship between Mimesis and Memesis. I read your article on Memes as well.
Good comments for us to consider:
"Hypertext theory describes how literary criticism responds to the democratization of the writing process, whereby the audience and author essentially share the same tools, and the boundaries are blurred. While those theories were developed long before the blogosphere and wikis made any real impact in the democratization of electronic text, they really did a good job predicting the changes on the horizon."